North Americanism turns 30
Foreign Policy | 5 January 2024
North Americanism turns 30
By Catherine Osborn
NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement, relaunched in 2020 as the decidedly less catchy U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA—came into effect 30 years ago this week, on Jan. 1, 1994.
NAFTA birthed North Americanism as not only an economic concept, but also, to a lesser extent, a political one. The deal removed trade barriers and boosted investment and cultural exchange among the three countries, self-styling the trio as economically dynamic and democratic at a moment when Mexican politics was showing signs of opening after more than 60 years of single-party rule.
NAFTA left both admirers and detractors across the continent. The treaty’s critics inside Mexico argued that the country missed out on development opportunities by opening too quickly to far-richer neighbors, and U.S. discontents lamented the loss of American manufacturing jobs to factories on the Mexican side of the border.
Perhaps the most visible resistance to NAFTA in Mexico was the anti-globalization Indigenous Zapatista movement, which had roots in a leftist insurgent movement that preceded NAFTA. The Zapatista movement is still active today.
The Zapatistas erupted into Mexico’s public consciousness with their marches and revolutionary manifesto. After 11 days of clashes with the government at the start of 1994, they reached a cease-fire and proceeded to set up communities in the jungle. While a 1993 Zapatista manifesto called for land and housing reform, the movement’s leaders soon added opposition to NAFTA and demands regarding Indigenous rights to their platform.
Former Foreign Policy editor in chief Moises Naím appraised the Zapatistas’ enduring influence in 2003, writing that they were among many movements across Latin America amplifying discontent with globalization. “The increased material well-being that was promised if Latin America embraced privatization, fiscal austerity, and free trade during the 1990s has yet to reach much of the region’s population,” he wrote, while the deepening of democracy “allowed individuals with similar interests to organize and gain a voice that had long been suppressed.”
The NAFTA anniversary has passed with little comment in U.S. media. But the treaty so reshaped Mexico that leading Mexican literary journalism magazine Nexos devoted an entire issue to taking stock of its lingering effects.
One somber take concluded that the deal fell short of Mexican officials’ promise that it would lead to economic “convergence” between the United States and Mexico. A more optimistic reflection pointed out that NAFTA allowed Mexico’s manufacturing sector to become connected to global value chains in a way that those in more protected economies further south, such as Argentina and Brazil, did not.
Less conventional analyses looked at how the U.S. educational background of top Mexican bureaucrats made them friendlier to a deal, as well as how NAFTA’s lifting of protections for Mexico’s domestic film industry weakened homegrown cinema opposite U.S. competition.
Compared to a previous period of high growth in Mexico, the years following the treaty seemed like “a lost opportunity,” former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a godfather of NAFTA, told Nexos in an oral history piece that appeared in this month’s issue. That account, which includes a dozen former Mexican officials, explores how they negotiated the treaty and worked to sell it to the Mexican public—and is complete with the quibbles of high-profile NAFTA opponents.
In the post-Cold War, pro-globalization heyday of the 1990s—and in the wake of Mexico’s own devastating debt crisis—free trade and economic opening were the favored recipe for the country to regain its economic feet. Jorge Castañeda, who criticized some aspects of NAFTA and later became Mexico’s foreign secretary, told Nexos that one of the deal’s key shortcomings was how it removed Mexican industry protections without securing greater guarantees of U.S. and Canadian investment in return. Today, some Latin American countries, including Chile, are seeking to avoid such a course by securing foreign guarantees of investment or technology transfer in exchange for access to their critical mineral sectors.
The NAFTA talks also included a showdown between Salinas and former U.S. President George H.W. Bush about whether the deal could increase permissions for legal migration. “You want the free movement of all goods, but why not the free movement of the people who make those goods?” Salinas recounted challenging.
But Bush would not budge on the matter, instead offering another concession: The United States would not object to Mexico’s state control of its oil sector.
Fast forward 30 years later, and Mexico City is still often acquiescent to U.S. migration policy while Washington has limited some of its pushback to Mexico’s energy policies—despite strong criticism from some corners of U.S. and Mexican civil society. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s moves to expand state control over the electricity sector have rankled private U.S. and Mexican companies as well as environmentalists, who say a more privatized sector would be able to transition faster to clean energy.
The Zapatistas have not survived the 30 years as well as the trade deal. Amid rising violence related to organized crime—another product of Mexico’s intertwinement with its northern neighbor—the group’s commander announced in 2023 that it was dissolving its self-run townships in southern Mexico.
This year, both Mexico and the United States will elect new leaders. When top-polling Republican Party candidate Donald Trump was president, he spearheaded NAFTA’s renegotiation. Thanks also to his Mexican and Canadian counterparts, the deal now includes stronger labor and environmental protections. It’s a reminder that North Americanism is still in evolution.
